In the last few months or so, it appears the PHP Community has finally found the Joel Test.  Lorna Jane spoke about it last month at PHPNW 09 and this week Brandon Savage adapted it for web development.  While I'd love to point out the fact that I've been writing about the Joel Test for years and even have the "Joel On Software" book on the required reading list for Blue Parabola staff... but I digress...

While all the rules are important in some way, there's one we've taken to heart recently within web2project:

Can you make a shippable version of your software in one step?

Previously, to make a release, we had to:

Yesterday marked four years of blogging for me.  While I can go on about how things have changed for me personally and professionally, I'd rather talk about the technology market... it's much more interesting.

Four years ago...

We were still recoving from the dotcom bust, now we're heading into rough times.

The concept of "web 2.0" was new and not horribly hammered into everyone's heads.

Social Networks were just coming online... Twitter didn't exist.

Although PHP had been around for about 9 years, it was just beginning to creap into the public spotlight.  The first ZendCon wouldn't happen for another year.